Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

I have come looking for you again. This time in the underground stacks of the Bodleian Library where I am hoping to find a seam of your life, a trace of you, running like an ore through the layers of books, documents, journals and letters buried beneath the streets of Oxford.

Making my way up Parks Road from the confusion of undergraduates and tourists on Broad Street, I pass the tall blue iron gates of Trinity College. I stop and look through their bars at the pristine lawns, symmetrical and level as the baize of a snooker table. An Asian couple are sitting on a bench at the edge of one of them. They have asked a passer-by, another tourist, to take their photograph. He sizes them up in the viewfmder, brings the camera down from his face, takes a step back, and tries again. The boy has his arm around the girl and both of them are wrapped in scarves. They smile, stiffen and wait for the click that will tell them this is caught forever, the moment confirmed. The passer-by hands the camera back and the couple thank him, then move on, cradling the camera and the frame of film inside it which holds the image in grains of silver, in fragile negative, that will, in years to come, be today: their memories of this town, of each other and maybe even of the passer-by who captured it for them. I stay at the gates for a while, feeling their cold iron against my cheek, looking at the implacable passivity of the college buildings, stately at the end of the lawns. Trinity was your college and I suppose these are the buildings that you must have walked through when you were a student here: writing, boxing, rowing, acting, playing out the gentleman’s life and preparing for a career in the law like your father and your brother before you. A half-blue, a runner, a member of OUDS, a poet who published his first pamphlet at the age of fifteen and then another here with Laurence Binyon. These are just some of the facts that I know about you, part of the scaffolding of names and dates that supports my idea of your life. But at the moment that is all I have, facts and the opinions of a few historians and theologians. But I want more than this, I want more than facts. I want to know you, who you were, and that is why I am here.

Turning away from the iron gates, I walk on up the street towards the library, the leaves of the trees turning above me, a few of them falling to the pavement, a slow burnt rain. The gothic Pitt Rivers Museum rises to my right, collections of skelet ons and other treasures housed within its patterned Victorian walls, turn into South Parks Road and walk up to the green brass dome that sits above the entrance to Rhodes House Library. Pushing the heavy door open, I walk in, my shoes squeaking on the polished white and black marble flooring. Busts of thinkers and academics look back at me from the far wall and the whole place bears a weight of study about it. A weight of history and lives kept.

Walking into the atrium I feel a thrill of anticipation at the thought of being so near you, of meeting you outside the pages of Steere’s biography, one to one. This sensation though, is also the excitement of investigation. Because I have not just been drawn here by the desire for more than facts. I have been sent here too, by a couple of lines in Steere’s book about your decision to leave for Africa that caught my eye and snagged on my mind:

There is an undocumented but persistent rumour of a love affair with a girl which might have changed Cripps’ earlier drawing towards the celibate life. This was apparently terminated by the decision to leave for Africa.

The statement is so cursory, so fleeting, that I can’t help but think it hides an undisclosed weight, like the tip of an iceberg that gives no sign of the bulk it carries beneath the water’s surface. This may of course be an illusion, a self-inflicted intuition, because in a way this is what I have been looking for. Evidence of your life beyond your actions, something that will give me a handle on the man behind the history. These lines seem to offer a chink of light onto such a man, suggesting as they do, a capacity for individual and romantic as well as philanthropic or Platonic love. But they cast a shadow as well as light. At times your life has seemed almost penitential in nature, as if governed by a duty of atonement, and I can’t help thinking that these two possibilities, an aborted love affair and the philosophy of your living, may be related in some way. That you had reasons to leave England as well as to go to Africa.

I walk up the dark wooden staircase to the right of the entrance hall and into a long narrow reading room, the walls floor-to-ceiling with books. Coats and bags hang in the corner to my left and there is a quiet hum of work. Down-turned heads, the click of fingers on a keyboard, the odd dry cough.

I type your name into the library’s computer system and it turns out you are not so hard to find. The words conjure up a list of your publications: poetry collections, novels, political tracts. But these aren’t what I’m looking for. What I want comes later: ‘X106: Correspondence, manuscripts, misc. photographs. 7 boxes.’ I fill out the reader’s request form, and hand it in to the librarian at the front desk. She tells me I’ll have to wait for a couple of hours; apparently you don’t come so easy after all.

I pass the time outside, walking through the buildings of the University that draw the eye upwards, as they were built to do, their yellow Cotswold stone contrasting against the bright blue of a clear autumn sky. Carved grotesques crouch and leer from under the modern guttering alongside yawning gargoyles, their mouths full with dripping lead pipes. It is lunchtime and the pubs are packed close with students after lectures and tutors in armchairs, shielding themselves against the day behind their papers. I think about joining them, going in for a drink in the smoke and the talk, but I keep on walking instead, the city flowing around me, restless with thinking about what those boxes will reveal of you.

When I return the library’s warmth is welcome after the cold of the day outside, an embrace of books and heating. I find a table alone, then go up to the desk and request your boxes. The librarian asks me which ones I want. She won’t let me have you all in one piece, I can only have you two at a time. So I take the first two. Begin at the beginning.

Taking the split cardboard lid off the first box, I find a large brown envelope, stuffed full with your letters. They are bound with a thin cord, and when I lift them out and pull on the knot to untie them, they give a little and expand, as if breathing out the air you breathed over them a hundred years ago. I turn over the first sheet and there is your handwriting. Seeing it there, in front of me, I suddenly feel as though I am trespassing, invasive, as if the sheaves of paper I am touching are not your letters, but your lungs. I have read about you, talked about you, but this is my first physical contact with you, tracing the looping, slanting ink that ran back through the pen to your hand.

I begin to read, but it is not always easy. You often ignore the rules of writing: writing down, then across the same page, sometimes overlapping paragraphs and adding your own marginalia as you go, as if no piece of paper could ever be large enough to give you room for what you had to say.

As I work through your years in that library, you get even harder to read. The paper becomes cheaper, and sometimes it isn’t paper at all, but the back of a school exercise book, a scrap of newspaper, a rough piece of packing material. Letter by letter, box by box, I span the fifty years of your life in Africa, tracing it in your handwriting; large and open when you are optimistic, smaller and constrained when you are angry or concerned. Year by year, letter by letter, I also watch the writing disintegrate, the strong line waver, the touch on the paper weaken, until, by the 1940 sand 50 sit is a child’s hand, unsure and unsteady. A letter to your brother William dated 29 March 1940 tells me why: